Eyeballing the Eyeballs

There’s some really interesting results from eye-tracking research over here. Basically the researchers used eye-tracking devices to record how visitors to a number of mock and real websites viewed the page. The results show some expected stuff (e.g. the top-left of the page gets the most eyeball time), but also some interesting revelations:

Underlined headlines discouraged testers from viewing blurbs on the homepage… This may be related to a phenomenon that we noted throughout the testing: visual breaks — like a line or rule — discouraged people from looking at items beyond the break, like a blurb. (This also affects ads, which we address below.)

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Damn… I may have to something about those big blue headlines between my posts… 🙂